SynopsisWhat If You Suddenly Became Psychic and Could Stop Two Cold-Blooded Killers?

What if...No One Believed You?

Small-town single mom Cass D'Angelo's life changes when a thunderstorm sweeps into her small Ohio River town. Cass must venture out in it to hunt for her son, seven-year-old Max. Lightning strikes a tree near her and a branch to the head knocks her unconscious. When Cass awakens a couple days later, she sees into the deepest secrets of those around her. Worse, some teenage girls have gone missing, and Cass sees their grisly fates. The discovery opens the door to a whole new life. The police are suspicious. The press wants to make her a celebrity. And the killers are desperate to know how she found their carefully concealed grave. Cass finds an ally in Dani Westwood, a local reporter. The two women begin to probe into the disappearances/murders and start to forge a romance. When Cass's little boy, Max, disappears, Cass must race against the clock to find him...before it's too late.

Reviews

From Gregg Olsen, New York Times Best-Selling Author

Horror fiction's most original voice knows how to spin a tale that makes a reader double check the door locks and windows. It is at once smart and twisted.

From Victor J. Banis, author of Longhorns

Rick R. Reed moves to the head of the graveyard with this bone-chilling story of a reluctant psychic, a pair of maniacal killers, and the slaughter of innocence. Fiendishly good!

Excerpt

The Summitville Paper was nothing much. It never had been—reporting on the lives of some 15,000 citizens filled usually no more than twenty or thirty pages. The national news occupied the front page and maybe continued on to the second. The remainder was taken up by advertising, editorials about such things as high school activities and earth-shattering decisions like whether local merchants should continue to stay open late on Thursday nights, and reporting who had gotten married, divorced, arrested, been involved in automobile accidents, or admitted to the emergency room of Summitville City Hospital. There was a comics page and a crossword puzzle, sometimes a syndicated movie review. If someone wanted something meatier, they purchased the Pittsburgh paper.

But still, Cass was more than a little intrigued when a nurse’s aide brought her that morning’s edition. It had obviously already been read, clumsily folded, the crossword puzzle attempted. But Cass could count on one hand the number of times she had been celebrated enough to make its pages: her birth, when she had been on the homecoming court in high school (a Carrie-like fluke...Cass had already been deep into her first crush on another girl and hadn’t even known why she had accepted Tommy Nevins’ invitation), when she had given birth to Max, and when she had sprained her ankle and had been admitted to the emergency room.

And here she was on the front page. There was no picture, but the headline was identification enough. Cass had assumed that when people got hit so hard in the head it knocked them unconscious for hours, they eventually died. But, obviously, that wasn’t true, because here she was, feeling better, actually, with every passing moment. The article gave credit to quick action by the Summitville Fire Department in saving the “local woman’s” life.

“We were on the scene immediately,” paramedic John Fore was quoted as saying, “and were able to restore the woman’s breathing within a couple of minutes.” Cass smiled, thank God for that. She went on to read how she had been rushed to the hospital and was now in stable condition.

Cass was just about to put the paper aside when another article caught her eye. “Teenager Reported Missing,” by Dani Westwood. It wasn’t so much the headline that got her attention, but the picture of the young girl beneath it. Pretty. Long blonde hair. And disturbingly familiar.

Even though Summitville was a small town, the girl’s name, Lucy Plant, didn’t ring any bells. Perhaps Cass had waited on her at the Elite, the diner where she worked. But still, no specific recollection came back. Cass couldn’t visualize the girl sitting at the counter, nor at one of the booths.

And yet she looked so familiar, as if she were someone Cass was friends with, or even a relative.

Cass scanned the story. The girl had been reported missing by her mother yesterday afternoon, just before the storm that had caused such a turn in Cass’s own life.

There were no clues. The girl, at least according to her mother, could not possibly have been a runaway. “Lucy’s a good girl,” Karen Plant had told Summitville police officer Myron Briggs. “She wouldn’t even go down the block to visit a friend without telling me first.”

The last time anyone had seen Lucy Plant was when her mother looked outside the living room window. Lucy had been playing with her Barbie dolls on the front lawn.

Cass closed her eyes. She remembered, suddenly, the storm coming, and not knowing where Max was. She sympathized with the girl’s mother and the panic she must have felt when she couldn’t locate her daughter.

A ceiling fan. Beneath her closed lids, Cass saw a ceiling fan. She didn’t know why. She didn’t own one herself, and the one in her parents’ living room was an entirely different model from this one, which was white, with a plain globe. Her parents’ fan had four frosted-glass light fixtures and faux wood blades.

Cass kept her eyes closed, watching the ceiling fan whirl, its blades blurring and becoming singular: there was something wrong with the fan. It didn’t work quite right.

Cass felt nauseated and opened her eyes. Her face was glazed with sweat. Her stomach churned and she was afraid she would vomit. Why was seeing a ceiling fan so disturbing? Or was this some sort of aftershock, an effect of her accident in the woods near her house?

Cass didn’t think so.

She glanced down at the face of Lucy Plant and sucked in some air. “Oh my God,” she whispered, “she’s dead.”

The smell of the Ohio River, fishy and damp, suddenly came to her, even though her hospital windows were hermetically sealed and the river was a good four or five blocks away. Why had she said Lucy was dead?

What did she know about it?

She closed her eyes again and saw a blinking light: red.

What did it mean?

Part of her wanted to close her eyes again, to see if more of the vision would come to her; part of her dreaded ever closing her eyes again. Where was this coming from? It’s just aftereffects, Cass, she told herself. You suffered a blow to your head, brain-jarring. That’s all.

She lay back on the pillows. When she closed her eyes again, she saw the blinking red light and a shadowy figure behind it: a woman’s head. The image, for no objective reason, was horrifying.

Cass sat up in bed, heart pounding. “No,” she said loudly, then whispered, “no.”

She forced herself to breathe deeply. She looked down at Lucy Plant’s calm, smiling face again: the straight blonde hair, the kind someone more romantically inclined would refer to as “flaxen.” The wide eyes, too big for her little-girl face, but which would someday be beautiful. The dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose. The chipped front tooth.

Cass felt her eyes brim with tears, a lump in her throat. “So innocent,” she whispered, rocking back and forth in the bed, unaware that she was even moving. “So innocent. What a waste.” She smelled the river again, and when she closed her eyes once more, she had another vision: the brown murky water of the Ohio River, its tree-lined shores and...and...

Cass bit her lip so hard she tasted blood.

A freshly dug grave.

Cass opened her eyes and batted at her own face, as if she could physically remove the odd imagery. She didn’t want to see these things. It was like a dream, a nightmare, but she wasn’t sleeping.

The images were so vivid—the knowledge so certain.

Lucy Plant wasn’t coming back.

Her gaze fell upon a line of type in the news story about the girl’s disappearance. Her mother was making a plea. “Please, if anyone knows anything about my daughter...if anyone has seen her, please, please, let us know. All we want is to know that she’s safe. No. All that we want is for her to be home again, where she belongs. Her little brother misses her. I miss her. Her father...we all do. Please, if you know anything about our girl, come forward.”

And Cass wondered what she should do. She visualized herself down at Summitville police headquarters, telling them she knew something about the girl’s disappearance. “Yes, I had a vision. The girl is dead and she’s buried near the river. I saw a ceiling fan and a blinking red light, like on a video camera.”

She would be treated with understanding and pity. Scorn and laughter behind her back. The police would call some mental hospital in Pittsburgh.

But what could she do?

She did know something about Lucy Plant. She was sure of it. She wished she didn’t, but there it was.

Cass flung the newspaper to the floor and forced herself to look out the window, where the tree-covered hills of West Virginia stared dumbly back at her, much as they stared dumbly at the shallow grave Cass was certain this poor young girl was buried in.

Footsteps. A child.

Cass sighed with relief. Max.

“I wanna see Mama!” he yelled.

And her mother was telling him to slow down.

It was the real world. Cass wondered if she’d ever be part of it again.

When love comes in not one but two packages, can Travis hold them together when pride dares to rip them apart?

Avery and Kaitlyn are Travis's every fantasy come to life. Fun, energetic and both are attracted to Travis. Silently, he's been lusting for the best friends for months. Passions explode when the ladies take control and awaken all their hidden desires. But when an old flame rises out of Kaitlyn's past, the line between love and pride is challenged. Can Travis prove he is the man they both want, the one man they both can love even when love was never part of the no strings attached plan?

Gratefully, the limo slowed then stopped, the door popping open in front of the club doors.

“Awright!” He smiled at Avery’s eagerness. “I love this kind of service.”

“You love any kind of service,” Kaitlyn shot back winding an arm through one of Travis’s once all three stood on the walk. Avery did the same.

Avery looked up at Travis through thick lashes, her brown eyes glimmering in the neon. “I love being serviced,” she purred, her lips moving with a sheen that made him want to reach down and devour. Then the meaning of her words hit him. Shit!

Travis managed to swallow the gulped exclamation. He focused ahead. “Ladies,” he encouraged, getting them through the doors before he tossed them back in the limo and stripped them both.

Avery lifted a hand, pointing out a perfect table through the darkened interior. Multi-colored lights glinted off of walls and furniture, sparking like indoor fireworks. The club was busy but hadn’t quite reached packed yet. It wouldn’t take long on a Saturday night.

“What do you desire?” he asked, immediately shaking his head at his own choice of words. He usually wasn’t the king of lost blatant opportunities. He followed Avery, sliding onto the leather and chrome shadowed booth, with the girls flanking him. Two hot and sizzling glances destroyed his efforts in the limo. He was hotter and harder than a steel rod laying in coals under his jeans zipper. Avery teased her lip with a flickering tongue and he did groan, glad the thumping music hid it. This was going to be a night of torture. He just didn’t know if he was going to love it or hate it yet.

Travis waved over one of the drink waitresses through the growing throng, giving their order than wrapped his arms around the girls again, fighting like hell to relax, or at the least, fake being nonchalant. After the drinks arrived, he asked them, “Dancing later?”

Avery nodded and Kaitlyn smiled in agreement, pulling the straw from her drink to slide into her lush mouth, wrapping her tongue around it, letting it disappear back and forth with slow momentum. He blinked.

Okay, now that was pretty clear, he thought. He swore he’d been imagining the teasing looks, the way lingering fingertips had caressed him on the drive to the club, blaming it all to a much too active imagination and a lust for these two that went way off the charts. Then he jerked up straight. While he’d been enthralled watching Kaitlyn working the straw like a wet dream pro, Avery’s hand had slid into dangerous territory, rolling over the bulge in his jeans.

He sucked in air, then fighting the shudders rocking his chest grabbed his beer and slammed half of it in three gulps.

Fuckin’ A, he wanted these two. Glancing at one then the other, he caught the heat in their eyes watching him, trading sultry promising looks and wicked little grins back and forth between themselves and slowly the light bulb began to glow. Two women, into each other, who both wanted him. And shit, did he want them. He’d craved them practically since the minute they’d jogged up to him and started talking to him with their tight little shorts and sweat-drenched tops.

The shudder that rolled down his body telegraphed to both of his dates. “Ooh shit,” he breathed. He closed his eyes swallowing hard, praying harder, praying like never before that he was right and if he was, ready to thank any god responsible. “Both of you?” They nodded, not even pretending to not understand.

“But let’s have fun tonight,” Avery drawled, lowering her lashes as her hand cradled his cock, her fingers slipping south to form completely around his shape, massaging lightly. “The night is young.”

“God,” he groaned. “You’re both sexier than hell.” The words fell out in a growl because Kaitlyn’s hand had also disappeared under the table. It began a slow meander up his abdomen, fluttering as if unable to decide its destination.

“It’s called che-mis-try,” Kaitlyn teased throatily, sending more sparks down his spine. “You are one hot thing too.”

Monday, January 11, 2010

Asher Myles struggled to put his life back together after an identity thief stripped him of everything but his talent for capturing light and shadow with a camera lens. With a new job and a new start, Asher’s on his way to Montana – and a meeting with the man he’s fantasized about since he first saw him on the silver screen.

Nick Light, actor, director, and Hollywood royalty, doesn’t like paparazzi. When he agrees to have his Montana ranch photographed for a style magazine, the unexpected happens – he falls for the man with the camera. Nick’s secret comes out when he realizes Asher is also gay.

If there’s one thing Nick can’t resist, it’s a man with a talent for seducing light.

EXCERPT

The problem was, I wanted Nick Light. The only solution was to seduce him.Easier said than done.

Nick’s bedroom was in the northeast corner of the house. The images taken of his room depicted a space bathed in twilight, misty. I put them in the mediocre folder. That room, with its massive pine furniture, much like what was in this guest room, needed the morning sun to show off the crisp palette of dark blues and earthy oranges against the softer ivories. Whoever did the interior of the house understood light and how to use it as well as any photographer.

Snapshots sorted and snack finished, I stripped and took a quick shower. I slid between the soft, expensive sheets and tried to settle down to sleep. It didn’t work well. Nick’s face floated before me in the darkness. I kept seeing those green eyes glittering in that first moment of bewitched awareness I’d had of him. I rolled over, uncomfortably aroused. He’d put me at the opposite end of the house for a reason—the long hallway separating the bedrooms. Anyone daring enough to walk that distance in the dark of the night had plenty of time to reconsider and turn around. The grandfather clock in the foyer chimed midnight.

I rolled out of bed and pulled on my jeans, leaving my underwear and socks on the floor. I didn’t need them for a fast trip to the bar. A shot of whiskey would relax me enough to sleep. I opened the door, grateful for the subtle lighting on every other riser of the stairs. Halfway down, I heard the rhythmic sound of someone using one of the weight machines in the workout room. Being twelve kinds of fool, I let the noise lure me to its source. I paused in the doorway, unable to force my shaking knees farther.

Nick worked out, shirtless, in form-fitting Lycra workout shorts and trainers, displaying the famous pumped six-pack abs that managed to get a close-up in every movie. The dark hair covering his muscled chest lay plastered wetly to his skin. A line of moisture soaked down his shorts from his navel, staining its way to the soft, rounded bump of his genitals. His powerful, pelted thighs steamed in the cool night air coming in through the opened windows. He stopped in mid-motion and let the weights fall. His rugged face appeared carved of stone, but his piercing gaze rested on mine, hot and wary. Alive.

Nick stood and walked toward me, never looking away. He stopped a half-step in front of me, and I was enveloped in the enticing scent of wet hair and clean male sweat. Tongues of heat licked my skin as primal male-to-male non-verbal communication arced between us. I licked my lips and his pupils widened. This was a bad idea, but only a nuclear blast would have kept me from it.

In slow motion, his hand skimmed across my bare shoulder and cupped the back of my neck. Disbelief that he’d actually touched me swirled in the back of my mind even as my hands reached for him, coming to rest on his sweat-slippery sides. Fear flickered in the depths of his eyes.

“God help me,” he murmured, his breath warm against my lips.

I didn’t give him the chance to pull away, not when we were this close.

Captain Ian Logan of Terra commands the most powerful starship ever built, the Rea Cheveyo. Adjutant Kiana ni Jamallan of Adonica is trying to escape the notice of her corrupt superiors, and in doing so catches Ian's attention. When an Adonican freighter goes missing and Kiana uses a mental ‘push’ to maneuver her way onto his ship, Ian seizes the opportunity to get closer to the lovely, prickly adjutant.

Unable to resist the advances of attractive, tempting - but human - Ian, Kiana risks the censure of her government. Enlisting Ian’s help to save a missing crew, she treads a dangerous path with her future on one side and Ian on the other. One misstep and she’ll lose both.

As their worlds collide, Kiana is forced to choose between fulfilling her destiny—or following her heart.

Talyss of Warlonah thought she knew what she wanted to do with her life. One look at Heath Douglas and everything changed. He thinks she’s a smuggler and her only option to safeguard the truth is to avoid him, but Heath follows her every move.

Captain Heath Douglas of the Rea Cheveyo has always had a curiosity about the feline-like Sheadonn. Spotting the Warlonah’s Glory far off the shipping lanes, he’s immediately caught in a cat and mouse game with that ship’s captain, the beautiful Talyss.

Matching wits, Talyss and Heath dance around the truth of her activities. Matched physically, they explore their passions. Taking Heath as a lover is Talyss’ right, but there is one truth she cannot escape.

As a daughter of Warlonah she must produce an heir—and not one with human blood.

Reza Breen holds the key to unlock the secret to her people's exile on the little planet of Colony. The very name of the people, Yahto, means exile. Or does it?

Decimated by a plague of unknown origin, Reza, a healer, has fought to save the Yahto. Then an act of bravery makes her an outcast with an impossible future. Determined to save her people, she runs headlong into a sexy brick wall named Mick Coulter.

Michael ‘Mick’ Coulter built his career as a crack trouble-shooter. Assigned as the first officer of the Rea Cheveyo, Mick is in the niche he wants to fill until his military career ends in a few short years. Then he's promoted to captain. His first assignment—protect a beautiful, stubborn outcast bent on courting danger.

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